Terry's 1st aquarium - ADA 60-F: Ohko overload (56K warning)

Hi all! So I finally got a little down time and got my ADA 60-F tank out of its box and onto a stand where I could start hatching away at a multitude of runs at hardscaping. After pouring hours and hours upon days/weeks/months into reading posts and researching I'm finally starting a journal. There are lots of pictures, so you have been warned!

And a FEW versions of hardscaping I went through, slept on, and then tore apart to redo:

Layout 1 (very 1st go at it...):

Layout 2:

Layout 3 (still trying to figure out the glassware placement... don't mind the little stones at the bottom, I was playing with some screen mesh to divide the sand and the substrate):

Layout 4 (Very minor adjustment of replacing the stone on the mid-right to something not so "overpowering" as in layout 3. I'm leaning towards this one. I've let it sit for longer than 24 hours without feeling the need for major adjustments):

And a little bit of a closer look at the stones:

And... just wanted to throw in a lofty rendering of what I'd been thinking of before I actually got my stones. It's VERY unlikely that this will be what comes to fruition:

It'll be awhile before this gets planted & flooded though, and the BF is still helping to work out how to hang the light fixture, get conduit bent, etc. ... Stay tuned for progress+updates!

I'm open to suggestions & comments before I decide to put down the sand. Please be gentle! It's my first time at this...

Wow that hard scape is sexy! IMHO layout 4 is amazing, one suggestion would be to move the small stone to the right of the large mountain either away or down in to the substrate slightly... it seems to be distracting from the 'master' stone (the large mountain).

Thanks guys! I played with adding some more little stones (I guess you can't have too many stones, right? ) back along the 'shore' edge kind of like I had for layout 3 and moving the small stone to the right of the large stone down and to the right a smidge.

What's up everyone... I'm just helping my GF (Terry) w/ a LOOONG NEEDED UPDATE on this tank. Reason being, we live together and it's in our office at our place and it's starring at me right now asking to be posted for TPT to see! LOL.... it's developing so nicely and I think she did a really phenomenal job at her first attempt at scaping.

One minor change to the original plan... we decided to go with the Cal Aqua lily pipes instead of the Do!Aqua's. They just looked better and more proportioned to size. After finalizing on a hardscape, she planted away and started to grow the HC and S. Repens via DSM.

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